Though her biographers say she was still in love with Reggie Smith after the end of the second world war, OM
had by then had various brief affairs. One with John Mair
, detective-story writer...
Grant, Joy. Stella Benson: A Biography. Macmillan, 1987.
239
Friends, Associates
Theodora Benson
TB
enjoyed a wide circle of friends both literary and non-literary. The former included Rose Macaulay
and Howard Spring
. She met her future collaborator Betty Askwith
(daughter of an old friend of her mother's)...
Friends, Associates
Olivia Manning
OM
's friends included a number of fellow-writers: William Gerhardi
, Ivy Compton-Burnett
(whom she had first met before the war, at a party given by Rose Macaulay
, and whose work she deeply admired),...
Literary responses
Olivia Manning
Some initial reviews were critical, but OM
was delighted when Elizabeth Bowen
referred to her masculine impersonality.
qtd. in
Braybrooke, Neville, and Isobel English. Olivia Manning: A Life. Chatto and Windus, 2004.
143
Five years later William Gerhardi
wrote that she here represents war in a compass so narrowed...
Textual Features
Dorothy Whipple
DW
also presents, with deliberate naivete, the ups and downs of her own career: her high points and failures of confidence. As her confidence grows, her narrative embraces funny anecdotes, moving moments, penetrating insights, and...